Maybe, if we cry at books, we cry because we just don’t know what else to do.
Author: richardsmyth
I'm a writer, journalist, editor, cartoonist and general freelance cultural janitor.
New Statesman review: ‘Our Place’, Mark Cocker (Cape, 2018)
Cocker is an unlikely radical in some ways, but at bottom the book he’s written – however measured, equable and intelligent – is a call for revolution.
TLS review: ‘Ground Work’, Tim Dee ed. (Cape, 2018)
The weight of the prevailing aesthetic – today favouring the brooding and sublime, the sensitive, the straight-faced – is as heavy as ever.
New Humanist feature: The Truth About Brainwashing
“Brainwashing” is, above all, a process. It’s not about telling people stuff that’s not true until they simply start to believe it. It twists control dials at a far deeper level than that.
New Statesman review: ‘Darker With The Lights On’, David Hayden (Little Island Press, 2018)
The framing of this debut collection by Dublin-born Hayden is insistently absurdist.
TLS review: ‘The Songs Of Trees’, David George Haskell (Viking, 2017)
For David George Haskell, the forest never really ends.
The Guardian Country Diary: the heather is a burnt burgundy, the grass yellowed
The moors are a tinderbox, parched and crisped by weeks of dry summer heat.
New Statesman review: ‘Signal Failure’, Tom Jeffreys (Influx Press, 2017)
Railways, like Romans, prefer to take the direct route. Tom Jeffreys, trekking on foot from London to Birmingham along the putative course of the HS2 high-speed line, is more of a rambler.
BBC Wildlife feature: Happy Planet?
There’s more to the lives of wild things than survival and death.
Richard Smyth 